Horace Walpole was partial in the highest degree. As the son of England's first Whig prime minister (Sir Robert Walpole) it would be surprising if he were otherwise. The essay's title gives the first clue: Horace Walpole believed in progress, in modernization and the superiority of everything English to almost everything that had gone before. He had a special dislike of Baroque gardens, as exemplified by Versailles, which for him symbolized absolutism, tyranny and the oppression of nature. He celebrated such quintessential English innovations as the ha-ha, and the triumph of the English style under Kent and Capability Brown Tom Turner, Professor of Garden History, University of Greenwich